BANGALORE, July 7: The Indian father of two suspects in the British car-bomb plot has confirmed that a man who rammed a flaming car into Glasgow airport was his elder son, a newspaper said on Saturday.

Maqbool Ahmed, a retired professor of medicine, told police in Bangalore the family had identified Kafeel Ahmed from video footage of a man being carried to hospital after the June 30 attack, the Times of India reported on Saturday.

“My son Kafeel Ahmed is lying in a hospital with 90 per cent burn injuries,” the father was quoted as saying. “My other son, Sabeel is fine and has been

allowed to call us every day.” Kafeel Ahmed was at the wheel of the jeep which slammed into Glasgow airport terminal packed with nails and gas canisters. The botched attack came after two failed car bombs in central London on June 29.

Ahmed's family was questioned by a police team on Friday for the second time in two days.

Sabeel Ahmed, a doctor, is one of the other suspects detained by British police in connection with the attacks. A third Indian, doctor Mohammed Haneef, is being held in Australia after he attempted to fly out on a one-way ticket.

Kafeel Ahmed, who holds a British doctorate in aeronautical engineering, had told his family that he was working on a “large-scale confidential project,” the Times of India reported on Friday.

“It is about global warming. I cannot reveal the details,” he had told his family in Bangalore before leaving for Britain in May, the newspaper reported.

“It involves a lot of travelling... the project has to be started in the United Kingdom,” he reportedly said.

“Various people from various countries are involved in this.” The day after two car bombs in London were discovered and defused and just before the Glasgow attack, Ahmed told his family in India that his “earlier presentation failed” and asked them to pray for him, the paper said.

Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed were “playful boys” who changed after they joined a radical Islamic revival movement known as the Tabligh-i-Jamaat, the Hindustan Times reported on Saturday.

The secretary of the Jamia Hazrat Tipu mosque, where the two brothers prayed while in Bangalore, was quoted as saying the pair had tried to influence the clergy and young boys to join the movement.

“As children they mixed with others. But when they joined the Tabligh-i-Jamaat, they picked a fight with some of our members,” said mosque secretary Samiullah, who goes by one name.

“Kafeel used to advise me not to smoke, drink or even watch movies,” said Afsar, a building contractor who declined to give his family name.

“Sabeel had plans to return home and revive a clinic set up by his father,” he added. Sabeel Ahmed studied medicine at Bangalore's BR Ambedkar Medical College.

Kafeel Ahmed studied at the University BDT College of Engineering in Davangere in Karnataka state and then received a doctorate from the Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, according to press reports.

They are both reportedly distant cousins of Mohammed Haneef, who went to the same college as Sabeel Ahmed and shifted to Australia from Britain last year.—AFP